Saturday, May 20, 2006

Check out The Colbert Report's recent piece on Libya. "Throw Mexico in there, and you can literally go from the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli."

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Can't escape it.

I flew all the way to Europe to get away from the societal scourge that is "literally-abuse." It didn't work. Tonight on international CNN, they had some special about some high-ranking guy at Nissan. I wasn't paying attention. Someone said, "He can literally walk in the room because he knows the cars so well." The meaning I gleaned from context was that he can just walk into any showroom and sell/talk about the cars without any preparation.

Over the course of the summer, depending on the rate at which I learn some French, we'll examine some of the ways Francophones use "literalment." Too early for that yet, though.

Monday, May 08, 2006

Are you ready?

The government is still not communicating with us literally. Or is it?


Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Verbicide

This article is way more interesting than my tort law casebook: "Verbicide: The Perilously Leaning Tower of Babble."*

It's from 1983, but speaks to something Stephen Colbert has expanded upon and dubbed "truthiness," which is the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.

"I suspect that we in this country are participating in a disturbed mental state, wherein our identity as Americans is undergoing massive overhaul. We are reaching the deadend of one definition of an American and are groping our way into another one. Nothing should be left to the imagination. That takes too long. Reality must be handed over immediately. No gratification is marketable unless it's guaranteed to be as quick as instant coffee. Hence, all those literally sentences. They serve our need to appear observant and objective. Above all, they serve our need to appear real.

"The abusers of literally are not describing an event nearly so much as they are asserting their sincerity."



*Richard Pindell, The English Journal, Vol. 72, No. 6 (Oct., 1983), pp. 48-52. Full text available on JStor (subscription only, I think).

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

The grammar police, literally

This is at once entertaining, gratifying and scary. Not in that order.

From the AP: "Language detectives literally read between the lines."

Given technological changes in how people communicate, including criminals, cops are starting to rely on language experts instead of handwriting analysis. The idea is interesting, but how heavily weighted should such evidence be? You could easily frame someone by writing like them, for one thing. The same problem exists in terms of handwriting experts -- haven't these cops seen Heathers?

The first sentence of the article captures the problem perfectly: "Because of a quirk in his grammar, a Pennsylvania wife-killer wound up with a 40-year sentence."

Most hilariously, a Pennsylvania cop said of their language expert: "He literally was able take the words right out of that guy's mouth." No one is above the law, pig. I hope the language expert treated him to a blanket party after reading that. And the person responsible for the headline should be fined and sentenced to community service. But not in a school.